Lolita Roadtrip

The first recipient of a grant from the New Play Production Fund of PlayGround, supporting Bay Area productions of new plays and local playwrights

This darkly comic play follows Julia (a rebellious Stanford graduate student researching her thesis) and Danny (a hitchhiking teenaged runaway she picks up) as together they retrace novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov's actual 1941 roadtrip from New York to Stanford. A series of cross country adventures ensues, as they confront their own dark pasts and discover what really causes a chrysalis to transform into a butterfly. Lolita Roadtrip was commissioned and developed by PlayGround, Jim Kleinmann, Artistic Director.